WaPo: Twitter Plans Mass Layoffs Regardless of Ownership ⇥ washingtonpost.com

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Faiz Siddiqui, Gerrit De Vynck, and Jeremy B. Merrill, Washington Post:

Elon Musk told prospective investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000.

Even if Musk’s Twitter deal falls through — and there’s little indication now that it will — big cuts are expected: Twitter’s current management planned to pare the company’s payroll by about $800 million by the end of next year, a number that would mean the departure of nearly a quarter of the workforce, according to corporate documents and interviews with people familiar with the company’s deliberations. The company also planned to make major cuts to its infrastructure, including data centers that keep the site functioning for more than 200 million users that log on each day.

My thoughts are primarily with the thousands of people whose employment will be terminated without fault or specific cause, but because Twitter has not become a financially viable company after sixteen years of management crises. Twitter apparently plans to use stack ranking to remove relatively low-ranked staff. No matter whether these layoffs will appease Wall Street investors or that one jackass buyer, it all sounds particularly cruel.